The Last Children of Tokyo - Yōko Tawada

The Last Children of Tokyo is far from the best novel I’ve read. However, it gripped me in a way that I don’t think I’ve been gripped in a long while. I read through the entire book on a very cold train journey from Blackpool to London and I won’t lie I think that was the perfect time and place to read it.

The novel is set in a future isolationist Japan after a man-made global catastrophe. It follows Yoshiro an over 100-year-old man who cares for his great-grandson on the outskirts of Tokyo (the centre is too polluted to be inhabited). This doesn’t seem like the most inspired setting until you learn successive generations of children have been born with severe deformities and intolerances, whereas the elderly seem to have everlasting vitality and never seem to die.

The book addresses so many different topics, ranging from isolationism, pollution and family dynamics. The most amazing part of this is these topics are mostly presented subtextually. This allows Tawada to avoid getting bogged down in in-depth discussions around these very deep topics.

The one gripe I have with this novel is that many of the metaphors used to present topics are sometimes confusing, and for such a short novel it is quite the slog to get through. However, with the benefit of hindsight, I would consider that is a Japanese book that has been translated and with the very limited knowledge of the languages uses a lot of idioms, which would help this book greatly in its original language.

My final take away is that these topics of isolationism and a “post-apocalyptic” future society are common in Japanese media/literature, especially in the times we currently live in of tumultuous politics and rapid climate change, novels like this are becoming ever more important.